What Human Attention Will Be Worth in Ten Years

Sometime last year I caught myself doing something embarrassing. I had opened a tab to read an essay I genuinely wanted to read, one I had bookmarked specifically because it looked interesting, and within forty seconds I had opened three more tabs, checked a notification, and completely forgotten the essay existed. The tab sat there for eleven days before I closed it unread.

I am not particularly proud of this. But I also do not think it is purely a character flaw. Something structural has been shifting for a while now, and it is about to get significantly worse in ways that will make a single, sustained minute of human attention genuinely rare and economically valuable.

What happens when content supply becomes unlimited?

The supply of content is now effectively decoupled from human effort, and that changes the economics of attention permanently.

The economist Herbert Simon identified the core problem back in 1971, well before anyone had a smartphone. A wealth of information, he wrote, creates a poverty of attention. He was describing the early days of television and print media. He had no idea what was coming.

For most of recorded history, information supply was constrained by how many humans could write, film, or broadcast things. That constraint kept a rough equilibrium in place: more content than anyone could consume, yes, but still anchored to human labor hours.

Generative AI breaks that anchor completely. A single model can produce in one second what would take a professional writer several hours. As the cost of generation collapses toward zero, every platform, every brand, and every person with an API key pumps more material into the same finite pool of human time.

Human attention is still capped at twenty-four hours a day. Everyone gets the same amount. It cannot be manufactured, stored, or scaled. When one side of a market expands without limit and the other side cannot grow, the scarce side becomes more valuable. The question is whether that value ends up going anywhere useful.

Where does the value of attention actually go?

Right now, the value of your attention goes to whoever built the pipe, not to you.

The current architecture of the attention economy is a straightforward extraction operation. Platforms engineer maximum capture of your time, then sell that captured time to advertisers. You get the content for free, which seems like a good deal until you understand that free means you are paying with something you never consciously priced.

Jonathan Haidt’s 2022 essay in The Atlantic made this point sharply, arguing that social media platforms have fundamentally rewired the information environment in ways that degrade collective reasoning. His framing was about democracy and discourse, but the underlying mechanism is the same: when attention becomes the traded commodity, the incentive is to capture as much of it as possible, not to make that time enriching for the person spending it. (The Atlantic, 2022)

I have been building products on the internet for a few years now, and the honest version of this is that I feel the pull too. Every dashboard shows engagement metrics. Every product meeting circles back to retention. The entire vocabulary of building software for the internet is a vocabulary of capture: hook, funnel, convert, retain. It takes genuine deliberate effort to ask a different question, like whether the person who used this product left better off than they arrived.

That question is starting to matter commercially in ways it did not before. I think the shift will accelerate sharply over the next decade.

Is collective attention actually shrinking?

Yes, and we have data on it.

Research published in Nature Human Behaviour tracked public interest across Twitter, Wikipedia, Google Trends, and several other platforms over multiple decades. The finding was uncomfortable: the time that cultural topics spend at the peak of collective attention is shrinking. Things spike faster, trend harder, and collapse back to baseline more quickly than they did twenty years ago. The acceleration is real and measurable. (Lorenz-Spreen et al., 2019, Nature Human Behaviour)

At the individual level, this shows up as a growing gap between the kind of attention you want to have and the kind you actually have. People want to read long books, follow complex arguments, sit with difficult ideas long enough to do something with them. Many people are failing at this not because they lack interest but because years of environments optimized for rapid context-switching have recalibrated their baseline.

A 2023 Microsoft report on hybrid work found that the average time workers spend on a single task before switching has dropped significantly since 2020, and that the most common cause is self-interruption, not external requests. People break their own focus before anyone else has a chance to. (Microsoft WorkLab, 2023)

I notice this in myself constantly. There is a version of me who could hold a hard technical problem in his head for three hours without fragmenting his concentration across twelve channels. I am not sure that version of me exists anymore in the same form. I have been working to get him back.

What this means for the next ten years

The ability to pay deep, sustained attention to something will become a credential, even if nobody puts it on a resume.

A developer who can sit with a hard problem for three hours without reaching for distraction. A writer who can hold a complex argument in her head long enough to develop it into something worth reading. An analyst who can read a dense paper and extract the actual useful insight rather than skimming for the headline. These look like baseline professional competence right now. In ten years, as median attention capacity continues to erode, they may look like genuinely unusual and valuable skills.

The economic logic is not complicated. Attention is the input to most knowledge work. If the quality and duration of attention that the average knowledge worker can sustain keeps declining, while AI handles the parts of the job that do not require sustained human judgment, then sustained human judgment becomes the bottleneck. And bottlenecks command premiums.

There is a bleak version of this trajectory, where the population stratifies between people who protected their capacity for deep focus and people who did not, and that stratification maps onto economic outcomes in ways that are hard to reverse. There is also a less bleak version, where new tools and norms emerge to help people reclaim some of what the current environment has eroded. I oscillate between these two readings depending on the week.

What I find less ambiguous is this: the skills that require sustained attention are exactly the skills that AI cannot replicate, almost by definition. AI can generate content at scale. It cannot be the person who reads that content carefully and decides what it actually means for a specific situation. That person is still a human, and that person is becoming rarer.

What changes when you treat your attention like money

About eight months ago I started being more deliberate about this. Not in a dramatic way. I did not go off-grid or start a meditation practice. I just started treating my attention more like a budget.

The practical version of this: I close things I am not using. I do not leave notifications on by default. I have specific times for reading long-form content and I do not try to do it in the gaps between other tasks. I am less available in the ambient sense and more available in the intentional sense.

The unexpected result is that the things I actually engage with have gotten noticeably better. When you stop filling every gap with low-density content, the things you choose to spend real time on feel sharper. There is a selection effect: you become more willing to abandon things that are not worth your time, and more willing to give serious time to things that are. The average quality of your attention experiences goes up.

This is not a productivity hack. It is closer to an acknowledgment of market conditions. If attention is becoming genuinely more valuable, spending it carelessly is increasingly expensive, even when the price is invisible.

The platforms know this. The next wave of products being built around AI is not primarily about delivering more content faster. The interesting ones are about helping people spend their attention better, through filtering, curation, and summarization, so that actual reading or watching or listening time becomes higher quality. This is already happening and will intensify.

What a focused hour will actually be worth

My rough guess is that in ten years, the ability to give something your genuine, undivided attention for an extended period will be recognized as close to a professional differentiator. Not formally, nobody will list “high attention span” on their CV, but economically, in the sense that people who have it will command better outcomes in most domains that require thinking.

The current attention economy is an extraction operation. It extracts value from human attention while returning relatively little to the humans providing it. That model is not stable when the thing being extracted starts to become genuinely scarce. Something will shift.

It might be that people start pricing their attention more explicitly, paying for ad-free experiences, using tools that filter rather than amplify, choosing platforms that treat engagement as a means rather than an end. It might be that the skills associated with deep focus get recognized and rewarded in labor markets. It might be something nobody has articulated yet.

What I am fairly confident about: treating attention as something worth protecting, during the years when it was fashionable to give it away freely, will turn out to be one of the better investments people could have made. I started protecting mine later than I should have. I am glad I started at all.

I do not know exactly what the attention economy looks like in 2036. But the asymmetry is clear. The thing everyone has equally, twenty-four hours and a fixed capacity for focus, is the same thing that infinite content generation makes increasingly difficult to spend well. The rarity is coming. The question is whether we notice in time to do something about it.